A day after the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, UK Internet Service Provider (ISP), Plusnet, reported the two days following the games release were the busiest ever hours for online gaming. Apparently the Xbox 360 version does cause some issues, as it uses a P2P (person 2 person) method for multiplayer, which makes the game and the ISP prone to lag and glitches. Plusnet worked hard to insure there systems were ready for this though.

Grand Theft Auto IV was released on 29th April, looking at our reports, gaming traffic on the 29th was roughly in line with the previous Tuesday; there was no noticeable increase in traffic. This may well be because a lot of people bought it online and didn’t receive it until the following day or those that did get it decided to play it offline rather than online that first evening.

The early hours of Wednesday [30th] morning (4am to 7am) saw an increase in gaming traffic of between 15% and 35% compared with the Wednesday before. Wednesday morning saw the biggest increase in usage with up to 65% more gaming traffic per hour than the previous week. Usage during the rest of the day saw an increase of around 30 to 40%.

Comparing that instead to Tuesday and usage across most of Wednesday was up to 50% higher.

The busiest hour for gaming was 8pm to 9pm on 30th April, followed closely by 9pm to 10pm. In fact the 8 to 9pm hour was actually the busiest hour for gaming in the past 6 months (and 9 to 10pm the second busiest) in terms of usage and very probably the busiest hour we’ve ever seen for gaming. The previous highest hour was 9 to 10pm on 4th November 2007, 8 to 9pm on 30th April beat that by almost 30%.

To add a bit more perspective, gaming accounted for approximately 7.6% of all downloads between 8pm to 9pm on 30th April, we’d normally expect to see between 3.5% and 5% be gaming around that time of day. (It was about 7.1% for 9 to 10pm).

As of Wednesday the number of online gamers was back to it's normal amount of  90,000 players.

Source: ISPReview